Senlin Ascends Tetrology - Josiah Bancroft

At Terra's suggestion, I recently finished the BRILLIANT 4-book Babel series by Josiah Bancroft. These were easily the most creative, exciting, and compelling books I've read in a long while. The books are set in a familiar yet distinctly different world from our own, one where the major cultural epicenter and tourist attraction in the land of Ur is the famed Tower of Babel! Pedantic and rule-loving headmaster Senlin brings his quirky and beautiful young wife to visit the Tower on their honeymoon, but swiftly discovers it is far, far different from the orderly citadel of culture he had imagined! Our unlikely hero rises to meet the occasion via the most satisfying character development I've maybe ever read. 

This book defies genre classification -- perhaps it's best seen as a swashbuckler, but this epic straddles fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, steampunk, comedy, and romance. A thrilling read for over a thousand pages! Moreover, Bancroft is so creative, and so rich in interesting observations on life, love, and friendship, that he crams within one book more insights than most authors can hope to share in their entire opus.  Destined to become a classic, and should be read by all.

Heap House - Edward Carey

My bookclub's first book of 2016 was Edward Carey's Heap House. Clod Iremonger is the 15.5-year-old protagonist of this delightful and deeply original young adult novel. Clod lives with hundreds of his relatives (both noble "Uppiremongers" like himself, and multitudes of more distantly-related servants), in a sprawling hodgepodge of a mansion. The family's estate is the focal image of the novel - built from relocated pieces of London homes, riveted together with steel girders, it spreads across an immense landfill ("the heaps"), basis of his family's garbage scavenging empire. Clod is driven to avoid his family members by the cacophonous voices he alone can hear emanating from their "birth objects," household items assigned at birth and carried upon one's person until death.  Thus, Clod spends much of his time wandering alone over the estate, until he one day meets a spunky serving girl, Lucy, and together they begin to uncover the grim foundation of his family's wealth.

An engaging tale with compelling characters that vividly explores the dangers of greed, xenophobia, and blind obedience to authority.

The Anubis Gates

... Wow. Where to begin with this book?

Okay, this is a book in the fantasy genre that, in some circles, I believe, has been sourced as an inspiration for steampunk novels, which I have yet to read. Honestly, I'm not sure why, because it had little to do with steampunk, but it had a sort of science fiction element in regards to time travel, and the rest is just straight fantasy.

"Just straight fantasy", however, can barely begin to describe the scope of this book. The story is so masterful and creative that it blew my mind. The basic idea is that a bunch of Egyptian warlocks are using their magic to change the past, thereby assuring Egypt's supremacy in the world. Our hero is Brendan Doyle, a modern expert on Coleridge, who travels to the past so as to attend one of Coleridge's lectures, but by the screwy nature of fate, he gets captured and is stuck in the past. The stories collide, and all hell breaks loose.

Again, I cannot describe just how awesome the story is. The plot devices are magnificent, the writing is great, the characters are amusing and engaging, and the extranormal aspets of the story are explained well and keep consistent with themselves throughout.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is at all interested in fantasy, or history, or even a little science fiction. Seriously. READ IT!

China Mieville - The City & The City

Mieville has always had a thing for patchwork cities. I first encountered the author years ago with the strange and wonderful Perdido Street Station, which I highly recommend. That novel was a masterpiece of imagination, set in a politically fractured steampunk metropolis. Its two sequels were entertaining but lackluster, and Mievelle fell off of my radar.

The City & The City, which shared the 2010 Hugo with Bacigalupi's vastly inferior The Windup Girl, is a detective novel set in the absurd divided city of Beszel and Ul Qoma, located somewhere in a post-Soviet Eastern Europe. I don't want to say too much about the nature of the relationship between the two cities, as the gradual unfolding of this relationship in the early part of the novel produces a somewhat maddening sense of disorientation that I found to be fairly masterful on the part of Mieville. For this same reason, I would recommend that one avoid reading too much about the book before diving into it.

The setting itself is something of a literary-theoretical thought experiment taken to an absurd extreme; this is self-conscious, as Foucault and Baudrillard are referenced by a character in the text (although I think the conceit is more due to Deleuze). Which is to say: this book is ambitious, in a way that (especially with the noir trappings) reminds me of nothing more than Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, to which this book is clearly indebted. And Mieville, somehow, pulls it off, producing a novel that's both a technical masterpiece and lot of fun.

edit: As a sidenote, you can understand the thematic structure of this novel in terms of Greimas' semiotic square, which is a bit like a two-dimensional dialectic and a really powerful analytic tool in general.